Unfortunately, since the rollout of the final piece of the ACA on Oct.1, it has been wrongly and prematurely assessed based on the technical glitches in its website, healthcare.gov. Anyone who has worked for a large corporation knows that the first days and weeks of a large, new system rollout can be frustratingly problematic. Thanks to the obstacles thrown in the path of development of the ACA and its online insurance marketplace by politicians at the state and federal level, its timeline was squeezed and financing insufficient from the get-go.

For comparison's sake, consider that Kaiser Permanente's highly-lauded, award-winning electronic medical record system, HealthConnect, developed to support healthcare delivery to 9 million Kaiser Permanente members, cost $4 billion and took 10 years to develop, while healthcare.gov had only a three-year development window and thus far has cost less than $400 million. Luckily, California took advantage of the money and opportunity extended by the federal government to build its own system and has avoided most, if not all, of the problems experienced by the feds.

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However, it is important to remember that even after it is functioning as intended, healthcare.gov and coveredca.com will still only be the gateways to the marketplace — not the product of that marketplace. The products will be healthcare insurance plans from insurance carriers we are all familiar with, modified only to ensure that buyers know what they're buying and get real value from what they've bought. As an added benefit, through this marketplace, any individual or family with annual income below 400% of the federal poverty level will be eligible for significant subsidies to help them pay for it.

By the way, don't bother looking in this insurance marketplace for the “Obamacare” Health Plan — there's no such thing. To the disappointment of some, nothing in the Affordable Care Act authorized the federal government to go into the insurance business itself.

A fair assessment of the ACA should be deferred three or four years when we can evaluate: